Marine life prosperous on unploded Nazi bombs sitting at the bottom of a German bay, discovered a submersible, even by capturing images of crawling sea star through a huge piece of TNT.
The discovery, which was revealed in a study published Thursday, was “one of these rare but remarkable moments of Eureka,” said Marine biologist Andrey Vedenin to AFP.
It is estimated that the waters off the German coast are strewn with 1.6 million tonnes of unploded ammunition left behind the two world wars.
In October of last year, a team of German scientists went to a previously unexplored discharge site in the Baltic Sea Luebeck bay and sent an unmanned submersible to 20 meters to the seabed.
They were surprised when images of the submarine of 10 cruise missiles from the Nazi era revealed. Then they were amazed when they saw animals covering the surface of the bombs.
There were around 40,000 animals per square meter – mainly marine worms – living on ammunition, scientists wrote in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
Andrey Vedenin / Deepsea Monitoring Group / AFP via Getty Images
“Despite the potential negative effects of compounds of toxic ammunition, published underwater images show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels and other epifaine on munition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs and wooden cases,” concludes the study.
They also counted three species of fish, a crab, sea anemones, a parent of jellyfish called hydroids and many seas of sea.
While the animals covered the hard bombs housing, they mainly avoided the yellow explosive material – with the exception of a case.
The researchers were disconcerted to see that more than 40 starfish had stacked a piece exposed to TNT.
“It looked really bizarre,” said Vedenin, scientist at German University Carl Von Ossietzky and the main study of the study.
Exactly why the starfish were there, but Vedenin theorized that they could eat bacterial films that are collecting corrodent TNT.
Life on deadly weapons
Explosive chemicals are very toxic, but animals seemed to have found a way to live nearby.
Apart from the starfish to death, they did not seem to behave strangely.
“The crabs were just seated and picked something with their claws,” said Vedenin.
To discover what type of bombs with which they were dealing, he went online and found a manual of the Nazi Air Force Luftwaffe describing how to manage and store V-1 flying bombs. The cruise missile corresponded exactly to the 10 bombs of the images.
Vedenin said “there is a certain irony” in the discovery that “these things that are supposed to kill everything now attract so much life”.
Andrey Vedenin / AP 
He compared it to the way animals such as deer are now thriving in the radioactive areas abandoned by humans near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Hard surfaces on the seabed are important for marine life that want more than mud and sand.
The animals once flocked towards huge rocks that littered the Baltic Sea, but humans withdrew the stones to build infrastructure such as roads at the beginning of the 20th century.
Thus, when the Nazi bombs are finally eliminated from the bay, the researchers called for more stones – or concrete structures – to be set up to continue to support marine life.
Scientists also plan to return to the site next month to set up a accelerated camera to look at what the starfish do.
Marine life also prosperous in shipwrecks
This is the latest example of flourishing fauna in polluted sites. Previous research has shown sinking and former complexes of weapons teeming with biodiversity.
Studies like these bear witness to the way in which nature takes advantage of human remains, overthrowing the script to survive, said Marine Conservation Biologist David Johnston with Duke University. He recently mapped the swallowed ships of the First World War which became fauna habitats along the Potomac river in Maryland.
“I think it is a really cool testimony of the strength of life,” Johnston told the Associated Press.
A 2023 article published in Bioscience revealed that wrecks provide important ecological resources for a wide variety of organisms, tiny microbes with large sea creatures.
“Small fish and mobile crustaceans often find a shelter in the crevices of the engulfed material, and the biggest fish and predators use shipwrecks like a food field and rest stops while swimming from one place to another”, according to the Noaa, which helped to carry out the study.
This year, a cargo cargo at the bottom of sea ​​off the Belgian coast was filled with a hiding place of rare flat oysters in order to help stimulate other sea species.
contributed to this report.
